The New Republic airbrushed a Hitler mustache on Saddam Hussein. CNN reporters described the bombing of Baghdad as "fireworks on the Fourth of July." The Pentagon fed prepackaged programs to the TV networks. Veiled Arab women became icons of an exotic culture. These are some of the ways the media brought home the war in the Persian Gulf as a national spectacle.Looking to old and new technologies for mass communication--from CNN to comic books, from international new agencies to tabloids, from bomb sights to the Super Bowl--the essays in this collection show the ways in which public information is shaped, packaged, and disseminated.The contributors include Venise T. Berry, Victor J. Caldarola, Dana L. Cloud, Tom Engelhardt, Cynthia Enloe, H. Bruce Franklin, Daniel C. Hallin, Kim E. Karloff, Michelle Kendrick, Margot Norris, Lauren Rabinovitz, Leonard Rifas, Therese Saliba, Ella Shohat, Holly Cowan Shulman, Mimi White, and Robyn Wiegmen.Susan Jeffords is the director of Women's Studies and a professor of English at the University of Washington. She is the author of Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. Lauren Rabinovitz is an associate professor of American Studies and Film Studies at the University of Iowa and the author of Points of Resistance: Women, Power, and Politics in the New York Avant-Garde Cinema.

From realism to virtual reality : images of America's wars / H. Bruce Franklin
Images of the Vietnam and the Persian Gulf Wars in U.S. television / Daniel C. Hallin
Kicking the Vietnam syndrome : CNN's and CBS's video narratives of the Persian Gulf War / Michelle Kendrick
The Gulf War as total television / Tom Engelhardt
Time and the television war / Victor J. Caldarola
The International media and the Persian Gulf War : the importance of the flow of news / Holly Cowan Shulman
Site unseen : an analysis of CNN's war in the gulf / Mimi White
The media's war / Ella Shohat
Operation Desert Comfort / Dana L. Cloud
Missiles and melodrama (masculinity and the televisual war) / Robyn Wiegman
Soap opera woes : genre, gender, and the Persian Gulf War / Lauren Rabinovitz
The gendered gulf / Cynthia Enloe
Supermarket tabloids and Persian Gulf War dissent / Leonard Rifas
Perspectives on the Persian Gulf War in popular black magazines / Venise T. Berry and Kim E. Karloff
Military presences and absences : Arab women and the Persian Gulf War / Therese Saliba
Only the guns have eyes : military censorship and the body count / Margot Norris
Afterword : Bringing the death-world home / Susan Jeffords
A Persian Gulf War chronology

Susan Jeffords is the director of Women's Studies and a professor of English at the University of Washington. She is the author of Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (Rutgers University Press) and The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War.

Lauren Rabinovitz is an associate professor of American Studies and Film Studies at the University of Iowa and the author of Points of Resistence: Women, Power ,and Politics in the New York Avant-Garde Cinema.